


where the light enters you

by gnimmish



Category: Jurassic World Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-11
Updated: 2018-06-11
Packaged: 2019-05-21 01:41:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14906054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnimmish/pseuds/gnimmish
Summary: She follows an impulse, leans down and kisses the scar, very softly, and Owen inhales, making a sound deep in his chest midway between embarrassment and pleasure. But he doesn’t pull away, so she wraps her arms around his waist and lays soft, deepening kisses along the exposed plain of his back until his breath has tightened in his chest, and he abruptly turns to kiss her so deeply she forgets all about his scars for a while.In the immediate aftermath of the events of Jurassic World, Claire and Owen stick together - and discover they have more in common than they realised. [cw: mentions of animal abuse, past child abuse, physical and emotional, not sexual]





	where the light enters you

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a short sexy bit of fluff in anticipation of seeing Fallen Kingdom and somehow turned into 5000+ words of Claire and Owen bonding over shared childhood trauma. Um... oops? 
> 
> Title from a poem by Rumi.

They set up in the hotel room Claire’s put up in immediately after escaping the island.

All the resort workers are sent to one hotel, while the park guests are triaged in two others. Owen has his own room two floors down, but Claire’s is bigger – bigger bathroom, better minibar, bigger bed.

Plus it’s gonna take a lot for Owen to let Claire out of his sight right now, and Claire keeps one hand on his wrist the whole time like she’s scared another dinosaur’s gonna drop out of the sky and carry him off. So he comes with her back to her room, like it’s not even a question that that’s where he’ll go – props his rifle against the closed door while Claire heads straight for the shower.

He orders cheeseburgers while she’s cleaning herself up, and puts on the TV and tries to find something – anything – that is not about the park. In the end he finds a corny old musical, and leaves that on with the sound down low. He figures it’s the sort of thing Claire will like, and at least there’s nothing even remotely reptilian in sight.

When she emerges from the shower, small in a courtesy hotel bathrobe, her hair and skin still damp, she smells so good he wants to press his face to her neck immediately, but she pushes him away with a stern look – belied slight by the flush in her cheeks and the bright, easy look in her eyes.

“No. I’m clean. And you smell awful.”

“You absolutely did not care about that a few hours ago.”

A few hours ago they’d been a gross, tangled mess, half-dressed and fucking against the back wall of an armoured van – the first place they’d found with a bare minimum of privacy on Isla Nublar before the ferry had arrived to pick them up. Claire hadn’t even bothered shoving his pants all the way before reaching inside his boxers, and she had had no objections to how he smelled while he went down on her.

“A few hours ago I was dehydrated and delirious from low blood sugar. Go take a shower, Mr Grady.”

He snorts, and takes great pleasure in leaving the bathroom door open so she can see him stripping off, although she never actually gives him the satisfaction of looking when he can spot her.

Still the hot water is a relief – he aches down to his damn bones. And the bathroom smells like Claire – like whatever fancy lotions she likes, like her hair and skin.

He gets out to the cheeseburgers arriving, Claire curled up on the couch eating the extra portion of fries he ordered, still swamped by the oversized bathrobe, her hair beginning to dry in the breeze from an open window. This time when he presses his face to her neck she doesn’t stop him, absently raking her fingers through his hair, fingernails scraping against the shell of his ear.

 

They eat, sleep, fuck and do all of that again – not necessarily in that order. But by about 3AM, Claire is feeling almost normal. Or at least, safe.

She is nestled against Owen’s chest in bed, listening to his heartbeat, feeling the sturdy weight of his arms around her. She can tell he isn’t asleep by the way he still reacts to her fingers tracing patterns up and down his back, but they haven’t spoken in a while. The silence and darkness is comforting. She’s had a series of texts from her sister – the boys are safe and well, they’ve just arrived home. Will Claire please visit once she’s done in Costa Rica? The boys are asking for her. And for Owen.

Claire promises they will come.

Sometimes there will be a crash or a shout from somewhere else in the hotel and Claire will jump and Owen’s grip on her will tighten. His rifle is still resting against the room door. There is nothing at all to be frightened of here, but if Claire closes her eyes too tightly she could swear she can feel the pungent heat of a tyrannosaurus breathing down her neck.

Still, if she stays like this, still and quiet with Owen, she feels a little less like she might be about to die. His warm, muscular, naked body tangled with hers is deliciously grounding, secure.

Her fingers find a knot of scar tissue in the lower half of his back, far to one side – as if something grazed his ribs. It’s nowhere near a fresh enough wound to have been picked up in the last couple of days, but she lingers over it anyway, tracing the slightly irregular edges until he twitches, dislodging her touch.

“Sorry,” she murmurs, aware that scar tissue can be sensitive, that maybe she’s set off a frayed nerve ending or two.

“S’okay.” His mouth presses briefly to her temple, and she looks up at him, finding his warm gaze in the darkened room. “You touch whatever you like.”

She manages a laugh, soft and tired. She’s spent the past several hours touching whatever she likes, as he well knows.

“Souvenir from the navy?” she asks, emboldened, because they’ve never talked about his past before, anymore than they’ve ever talked about hers.

“Not that one, no,” and he sits up to show her a mark near the top of his arm, “stab wound – that was the navy. And this one. And – this one. Bullet.” He taps a deep pock mark in his shin. “Nah, the one in my back is from way before any of that.”

He twists, so she can see it – an irregular cluster of divots, pale and ragged. Claire touches each of them, curious now – her mathematical, problem solving brain is immediately running down a list of potential causes – not a stab wound, not chicken pox scars –

“Shotgun,” Owen tells her, looking almost sheepish. “I got lucky, maybe seventy percent of it missed me, or I’d have collapsed a lung or something.”

It strikes Claire that there’s  nothing lucky about being hit with any percentage of a shotgun blast, but Owen doesn’t seem like he’s about to elaborate, and she’s cautious of pushing him. She’s never been especially open about any of her own scars – to expect a sudden free flow of tragic backstory from him seems hypocritical.

Still, she follows an impulse and leans down and kisses the scar, very softly, and Owen inhales, making a sound deep in his chest midway between embarrassment and pleasure. But he doesn’t pull away, so she wraps her arms around his waist and lays soft, deepening kisses along the exposed plain of his back until his breath has tightened in his chest, and he abruptly turns to kiss her so deeply she forgets all about his scars for a while.

She climbs on top of him this time, and moves with the growing assurance of someone who knows this man’s body, knows Owen, in a way she’s not sure many women have, and Owen grasps her thighs hard enough to bruise, arching up into her to match her pace.

They’ve slowed a little, by this time in the night, gone from the frantic, grasping scramble of _arousal, pressure, release_ to something more leisurely and tender. Owen reaches up to cup her face, and she leans down over him to kiss him again, every nerve ending in her body slick with pleasure and a fierce kind of joy when he mumbles her name against her mouth.

By the time they’re done, she’s sated and drowsy again, and Owen is nuzzling at her hair.

“Goddamn you’re perfect,” he tells her, his eyes heavy lidded, yawning wide, his gaze on her heady and indulgent and just a little wondering. “Just – fucking perfect. I could do this forever.”

He means the sex – she’s sure he means the sex, not the relationship or whatever they might call what’s between them – but it still feels good, for someone to want her like that. Especially Owen, so gruff, rough and ready, her caveman, running his hands over her body like he’s amazed to be touching her at all, going goofy and tender when she touches his scars, asking her _do you like that? More or less? More? Okay, baby, whatever you want –_

The next few days are exhausting, by turns boring and stressful, as InGen’s board flies in, with what feels like an army of lawyers and PR people and paperwork.

Claire hates it. She hates all of it. She has given seven years of her life to this company and all its amounted to is her overseeing one of the worst man-made disasters in recent history. Hundreds of people are injured, at least fifty – many of them her own employees – are dead. Her assistant was _literally eaten alive_ , in large part thanks to Claire sending her to babysit the nephews she should have spent the day with herself.

And hundreds of endangered de-exctinct animals that are meant to be her own direct responsibility, have just been left to fend for themselves on an island where they will undoubtedly now slowly die of neglect. It’s a compounding tragedy that makes Claire feel faintly sick at the very thought.

And now InGen is here so desperately and clearly trying to save face, as if they can somehow contain what has happened, and all she feels is disgust.

To his credit, Owen doesn’t leave her side.

When the board tries to bring her in alone to ‘debrief’ her (to grill her, to hunt for signs of someone they can blame) he looks about ready to punch the guy who tries to stop him following her into the meeting room the board has taken over. He gets so red and angry when one of the lawyers asks what safety procedures she failed to administer that Claire grabs his arm to stop Owen reaching over the table and getting the lawyer by the lapels of his expensive suit. He actually growls at the poor guy.

She hears one of the PR people calling Owen her ‘guard dog’. And it’s an apt description, though she bristles at someone comparing him to an animal.

She comes with Owen into his own debriefing, diplomatically intervenes before he loses his temper, keeps a hand on his shoulder when he starts to twitch, persuades him to refuse any more meetings until he can at least get a union rep to come with him.

She brings him back to her room, which has become their room, to watch musicals and have sex and talk about whatever will get their minds off the day.

All she wants is to get away from here. Go see her sister. Go see the boys. Eat and sleep and watch TV and pretend she has a normal life for a while. She needs silence and distance so she can get her head together and decide what in the hell to do next. And she needs Owen. She _wants_ Owen.

“We could just go,” Owen points out, stretched out on the bed beside her. “They can’t keep us here. We’re not prisoners.”

Claire is perched on the edge of the bed, putting on her night cream, massaging jasmine scented moisturiser into her cheeks, her shoulders. It’s more about the ritual than any particular belief in the holy unscientific promises of the lotion’s ‘anti-aging’ and ‘super-firming’ properties. The creams and perfumes and hair products, overnighted to her by her sister when it was clear they’d be staying for a while, make her feel a little in control again. And Owen seems to like it – she caught him opening up one of the lotions to sniff it the other day. He still likes to press his face to her neck right after she showers.

“And that’d make anything better – how?” She raises an eyebrow at him.

He shrugs. “We wouldn’t be here anymore.”

“We have to be here,” she replies, firmly, “we need to know what their strategy is. When we sue – ”

“Oh god,” Owen pulls a face.

“We’re going to sue, Owen – everyone is. There’ll be multiple class action lawsuits, I’m sure of it, that’s why InGen is so desperate to find someone else liable,” Claire pushes her hair back off her face, “and people should sue. There needs to be a legal precedent set – legislation – something like this can never be allowed to happen again.”

“And we get that by suing?” Owen looks deeply sceptical.

“Well giant corporations don’t just magically do the right thing without pressure to change,” Claire shrugs, “we do live under late-stage capitalism, after all.”

Owen groans again, pulling a pillow up over his head.

Claire snatches it from him, giving him a stern look. “Why? What do you want to do?”

For a moment Owen doesn’t answer, looking up at her, his expression unreadable. “I want to get a van. And I want to take you, and the van, and just – drive. Go find some happiness. Stay there.”

It’s a surprisingly romantic idea for a guy like Owen, though Claire supposes it makes a degree of sense – Owen the outdoors guy would pretty obviously be happy in a van on the road for the rest of his life. His ambitions probably amount to building a cabin somewhere and living off grid like one of those doomsday preppers on the natural history channel. That’s pretty much how he’s spent the last five years on Isla Nublar, despite the fact that he could have had a perfectly comfortable set of rooms in the resort.

She is reminded, for the first time since everything went to hell, just how different they are. But she pushes that thought aside as something to trouble her at another time, and leans down and kisses him, because right now he’s everything she has.

“Soon,” she promises, “this’ll take a couple more days, then we’ll go see my family, and then we can get a van.”

“Okay.”

She curls herself into his side, lays her head on his chest – he puts his arms around her.

“Think you’ll know happiness, when you find it?” She asks him, quietly. She can feel him playing with her hair.

“Think I might,” he answers, after a moment. “I mean, as long as you’re there.”

Claire feels something in her chest squeeze.

“What about your family?” She asks, into the silence, curling her fingers at the neck of his t-shirt. She’s taken to sleeping like that, her hand over his heart.

“What about ‘em?”

“I said we’d visit my family. We could visit yours if you want.”

He chuckles, low and dark. “Nah. No. Not a good idea.”

“Okay,” she murmurs – not pushing. She’s not going to push.

She feels him take a deep breath, though – feels him thinking about what he’s about to say.

“When I was thirteen I had this dog,” he starts, abruptly. “I found her. We lived out on a farm – I mean, what used to be a farm. Just me and my dad. Mom took off so it was just us, five miles from the nearest neighbour, ten miles from the nearest store, electric was on and off, the phones must’ve gotten cut off when I was pretty young cause I don’t remember ours ever working –  a farmhouse and a barn basically slap bang in the middle of satan’s asscrack, rural missourri. And I found this dog. She was this little pitbull mix, I guess. Like six months old, skinny, scared, hiding out down our driveway. So I picked her up and I took her home. And my dad didn’t care because he never cared about anything that didn’t come in a beer bottle. Anyway. Me and this dog.” He pauses, swallows, and Claire cranes her neck to look up at him because she can feel something in his voice. “First animal I ever trained. I think I’d found this book about dog behaviour or something – it just felt kinda easy. I mean, anything’s easy compared to a raptor, but still. I fed her up, I got her trust, I got her a collar, and after that she just kinda followed me everywhere. Even to school sometimes – the bus driver would let me bring her onboard every now again.  Kept some of the bigger kids off my back. Ate half my lunch most days. But she was my friend, you know?”

“What was her name?” Claire asks, though she’s certain she already knows the answer.

“Blue,” he glances down at her. “Don’t.”

“What?”

“Don’t say anything. I didn’t name the raptor after her, okay? Coincidence.”

“Sure.”

He grimaces at her, though she can tell his heart isn’t in the expression. They both know that she knows he’s more sentimental than he likes to let on. He reaches for a bottle of water on the bedside table, takes his time sipping, swallowing – Claire waits.

“When my dad drank – which was always – but when he really drank, it could get bad sometimes. You know?”

“Yeah,” she knows probably better than he realises.

“Mostly he’d just throw stuff at me, if I got in his way. Mostly I stayed out of his way.”

She squeezes his arm, tight.

“Blue never liked him. Pitbulls are like that. Really strong protective instinct.” Owen pauses again, and Claire has a horrible feeling that she knows what’s coming.

“To this day I don’t know if she went for him, or if he just didn’t like that I had something that made me happy,” Owen frowns, “Anyway. I got home from school one day and he’d shot her.”

He says this almost casually, like it was just something else any parent would do – like his dad had picked up a carton of milk and bought him some new shoes and shot his dog just to tick it off that day’s to-do list.

“Oh, Owen,” Claire swallows, feeling a sudden pit of grief for the boy he’d once been.

“Yeah, no, it gets worse,” Owen manages a dark, humourless huff of laughter, “because I see her, bleeding, in the drive way, and she’s still alive, so I throw myself over her, you know? I just wanted to – I don’t know what I was doing. Trying to stop the blood, I guess. And my dad comes at me, and he still has the gun, so I’m grabbing for it and he knocks me flying and shoots my dog again – ”

Claire sucks in a horrified breath. Owen’s voice barely trembles as he tries to explain –

“So I know she’s dead, so at that point I want to kill him – like, I hated my dad already, you know? But I’d never seriously wanted to murder the guy before – but I would’ve just then – if I could’ve – and I’m so mad I lose my mind screaming and I run for the barn because I know there’s more guns in there and all I can think is that I’m gonna get one and kill him – and – I mean that’s where I’m lucky he was so drunk because his aim was way off – ”

“He shot you?!” Claire tries and fails to keep the squeak of horror out of her voice – but of course. The little pockmark scars on his back, off to the side like something had grazed his ribs. Thirty percent of a shotgun blast. Jesus Christ.

“Don’t,” Owen says, shaking his head, “don’t do that. It was a long time ago. I’m okay.”

Claire props herself up on her elbows, looking down into Owen’s face by the dim light of the reading lamp off to their left. He’s clear-eyed – only the faint crease of his brow betrays the deep end of the horror he must have waded through to get to adulthood. She strokes his hair, compulsively, because if she doesn’t offer some sort of comfort she’ll start crying. His eyes close for a second, turning his head into her touch.

“Did you at least get to a hospital?”

“School nurse sent me to the ER the next day,” Owen says, like that isn’t an unacceptably long time to wait for medical intervention, “called CPS. They did an investigation, shuffled me through some foster homes – dad got me back, stayed sober for, like, an entire week, then…”

Owen trails off, waving a hand.

“Oh, Owen.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know,” she keeps stroking his hair.

Owen glances at her after a moment, managing a grim little smile. “Just in case you wonder why we’re not ever gonna visit my family.”

“Yes that – makes sense,” Claire agrees, leaning down to kiss his temple – though he turns his head at the last moment and kisses her properly instead, pulling her closer.

“I don’t want that son of a bitch anywhere near you,” he tells her, after a moment, his expression suddenly sincere, “he never gets to touch anyone I lo– ” he catches himself just before the word can escape, and Claire feels her face heat up at his momentarily startled expression, like he hadn’t realised how deeply he felt either. “Anyone I care about,” he corrects, swallowing, “not ever again.”

“Okay,” she tells him, softly, “okay.”

She kisses him again, to fill the laden silence, lacing her fingers through his and clasping his hand as tightly as she can. _I’m here_ , she thinks, desperately hoping he might glean at least some of the meaning from her grip, _I’m here and I won’t ever let anyone hurt you like that._

“Hey,” she sits up, just a little shakily, “wanna see something? Since you showed me yours.”

He blinks, confused for a moment, half sitting up to follow her. “What?”

“Here,” Claire feels for the ridge of scar tissue she knows pokes out just beyond hair line, almost perfectly in the centre of her forehead – she pushes her bangs back so Owen can see it, and he frowns, leaning closer, gently parting his hair with his fingertips so he can see how far back it goes.

Three inches. She remembers the stitches.

“How’d you get that?” He asks, softly, glancing into her face with a concern she hasn’t seen from anyone who wasn’t her sister in a very long time.

“My dad was pretty into getting drunk and throwing things at me too,” Claire shrugs, trying to affect his grim nonchalance. “This one was a wine bottle. Shattered off my head, so – got a pretty nasty cut there.”

“Fuck,” Owen’s jaw clenches, his rage abrupt and potent. “Where is he now? Can I kick his ass? Because I will kick his ass.”

“Ran his car off a bridge when I was nineteen,” Claire glances down at her fingernails, “I was already at college by then.”

“Jesus,” Owen mutters, and he pulls her close, pressing his face into her hair. Claire anchors an arm around him, bunching the fabric at the back of his t-shirt into her fist, clinging, just a little. But if he’s willing to show her the bleakest parts of his history, she should be able to offer something back.

“I got off pretty lightly,” she tells him, honestly, “it was always Karen who got the worst of it – she was the oldest, she used to protect me. Wasn’t till she left for college that he really started in on me.” Really, what she grew up with sounds pretty tame compared to Owen’s childhood anyway. Her dad never went in for pet-murdering and firearm handling.

Owen is cupping her face in her hands, smoothing the edge of the scar with a thumb.

“If I’d have been there, I’d have killed him,” he says, and Claire believes him.

“Don’t,” she says, softly, “it wouldn’t have done you any good to try.”

“Might have stopped him ever laying a hand on you again.”

“And then you’d be in prison over my dad who – believe me – wouldn’t be worth depriving the world of Owen Grady,” Claire tells him, firmly, looking up at his gentle expression, “you’re ten times the man he ever was.”

The corner of Owen’s mouth quirks – sheepish, flattered, just a little disbelieving. It occurs to her, not for the first time, that he doesn’t think very much of himself.

“Still,” he murmurs, “wish I coulda protected you.”

“Wish I could’ve protected you,” Claire returns, shortly. “I was seventeen. You were so young.”

“Nah, I was okay,” Owen glances away, self-consciously.

“Owen, if you were thirteen you were barely older than Gray is now,” Claire points out, gently. “What would you do to someone who hurt him like that?”

Owen’s expression clouds at the very idea.

“Let’s just agree that drunk child abusers are bad people to have as parents,” Claire suggests, and gets a wry smile in return. “Though for the record, I really wish you’d been my boyfriend back in highschool.”

She’s grateful that he doesn’t dig into her calling him her _boyfriend_. They haven’t had that conversation yet – though she has to assume that surviving one life threatening catastrophe together followed by six days of incredibly sex counts for something.

“I’d have been kind of a shitty boyfriend,” Owen tells her, instead, “I was not the refined gentleman you see before you today when I was seventeen, believe me.”

Claire laughs, softly. “Still, I think you’d have taken care of me.”

“Yeah,” he kisses the top of her head, “Yeah, I’d have done my danmdest.”

She knits their fingers together, and lets her forehead rest against his, giving herself a moment to indulge in the idea.

It’s not an unpleasant image – a seventeen year old Owen Grady, the burly jock boyfriend she’d always secretly coveted but never had the guts to pursue because she was a chubby, awkward girl who liked maths and whose mother was overtly embarrassed by her weight. But it would have been magnificent, Owen turning up at her house to pick her up for a date, finding her bleeding and screaming while her mom was begging her not to call 911. He’d puff up his chest, take a baseball bat to her dad’s head, scoop her up and carry her out of the house never to look back – preferably whilst it exploded behind them, action movie style. Maybe he’d have a convertible to put her in and drive her to her sister’s dorm room, where there’d magically be room for her to stay till she turned eighteen.

It was the sort of fantasy she’d entertained fairly often back then, though the face of the fictional boyfriend had changed on a regular basis – pop stars and football players and the cutest boy in the drama club – so she kisses Owen, gently, and lets it come as close to reality as it will ever be.

He pulls her into his lap, folds his arms around her.  “Where was your mom?”

“My mom?”

“When all of this was going on?” Owen looks down at her, curiously, “she was okay with you and your sister getting hit?”

“Petty much, yeah,” Claire shrugs, her words muffled against his chest, “but she was… not inclined help.”

Owen doesn’t ask further, smoothing a hand up and down her back. Claire finds the shotgun scar in his, touches her fingers to the wrinkled, toughened skin. The place where he was torn open, and healed. _The place where the light enters you_ – that was a poem or something, she was sure.

“She always felt like, if she could keep us together on the outside, it didn’t matter so much if the inside was a hell hole. She was all about – you know – the school photos, the family Christmas cards, having the picket fence and the god awful lawn ornaments. She wouldn’t leave him. Didn’t want the neighbours gossiping. ”

Karen still sees her for birthdays and holidays – Claire isn’t sure she could tolerate a family thanksgiving with the woman without hurling the goddamn turkey at her head.

Owen grunts. “That’s fucked up.”

The day she’d left for college, Claire had deliberately run over her mom’s favourite china gnome. The sound it had made under her car’s back wheel had felt infinitely satisfying. “Yes. Yes it is.”

As an adult Claire can see that her mother was being abused too, that she had no career of her own, no money, no family, and an idea, planted in her childhood Catholicism, that a marriage should be clung to even as it rots rather than contemplate d-i-v-o-r-c-e. And she can see that all of those factors conspired to trap her in a marriage with a narcissistic drunk who started calling Claire a ‘fat bitch’ before she’d even really understood what those words meant. None of that takes the edge off her distaste for her mom as she ages into an increasingly pernickety, pathetic old woman who still sends passive aggressive birthday cards about how little her youngest daughter bothers to see her.

 _Who’s fault is that?_ She’s always tempted to reply, but she doesn’t, mostly for Karen’s sake. Karen was always a better person than her, and she wants her sons to know their grandmother, so Claire doesn’t reply to the birthday cards and stays away on thanksgiving and lets the tentative peace in the family prevail.

 “So maybe we skip visits with your mom too?” Owen asks, and Claire laughs, shortly.

“Great idea.”

“Jesus who invented parents,” Owen squeezes her, and Claire holds on to him – this wounded boy, now such a good man, kind and protective and funny and smart. “They should be fired. Parents are just a dumb idea all round, huh?”

“Yeah, the worst.”

That night it’s Owen’s turn on top. He’s a furnace over her, hard muscle and damp skin that tastes like sweat, one arm under her left thigh, pulling it up against his side, the other supporting his weight by her head so he doesn’t totally crush her, though tonight she’s not sure she’d mind. She digs her nails into his back and holds him so tight her arms ache – she wants him, all of him, between her and the world, just for a moment – his seeking mouth and his able fingers and his broad shoulders. While she’s full of him, under him, covered and safe, there isn’t a damn thing that can touch her but him, and that’s all she wants.

Afterwards, she slides out from under him, sated and boneless, and kisses the scar on his back. It’s not the best thing to have in common, of course – the shitty dad, the absent mother, the childhood spent like a caged rat digging for freedom – but it’s that reminder of who they both are, at their cores. Survivors, sticking together.

Owen opens one eye, smiles drowsily and holds out an arm so she can fold herself under it. She’s asleep soon after.


End file.
